Unofficial news and tips about Google

January 25, 2011

Chrome's New Sad Tab Page

The latest Chromium builds include a new sad tab page that replaces the famous "aw, snap!" message with "he's dead, Jim!". The message continues: "Something caused this page to be killed , either because the operating system ran out of memory, or for some other reason. To continue, press Reload or go to another page." To see the page, just type about:kill in the address bar after opening a new tab.

"He's dead, Jim!" is a catchphrase used by Leonard H. McCoy, a character from Star Trek. "The line has entered popular culture as a general metaphor, with uses as diverse as descriptions of an unresponsive electronic circuit, an example of how to add an audio file to function as an alert sound in a computer system, and an illustrative quote regarding how to know if one's opponent has been destroyed in an action hero game."

How ridiculous is this - I saw the screen when I pressed restart - just for an instant and though it was some kind of virus - spent 25 mins - no wasted 25 mins trying to find out what the hell was going on only to find it was bloody google - grrrrrrr

Unfortunately, the portuguese translation doesn't do the quote justice. The translator obviously didn't watch Star Trek: The Original series - He replaced "Jim" with "João". Even though the names are roughly the translation of one another, it makes no sense whatsoever.